Three Days Before the Shooting, The Unfinished Second Novel by Ralph Ellison is magnificent. It is magnificent for its plot and characters, for its words, and for Ellison’s fearless grappling with themes of race, identity, fate, responsibility, and the promise of the American dream. This edition put out by Random House and edited by John F. Callahan and Adam Bradley encompasses forty years of Ellison’s working on and reworking of the novel and includes Ellison’s multiple variations of chapters and the notes he made to himself while writing (which are simply captivating: “Nota bene: Remember the sound of your machine, typewriter or computer, helps you work! Start it going, even if at random!”) The editorial comments offered by Callahan and Bradley help enormously in understanding the layers of narrative and meanings that Ellison balanced along a continuum of action, reaction, and observation.

Three Days Before the Shooting is the story of Hickman, bluesman, preacher, and foster father; Bliss, an abandoned child who grows up to become Sunraider, racist senator; and Severen, another abandoned child who grows up to become an assassin. A white child is given to a black man amidst a cacophony of lynching and birthing; the child is his to raise, a gift in exchange for lives lost. The child is raised with all the hope of the black community behind him and a belief that racial identification can be transcended. But the child grows up and leaves his people, betrays those who have cared for him, and tries to publicly flog them for their race, their status, and their dreams. Sunraider’s rejection of his upbringing will wreak its own judgment hard upon his head: another white child will long for the blackness denied him, and render judgment from on high.

The multitude of characters in Three Days Before the Shooting, Hickman, Bliss/Sunraider, Severen, Janey, Lee Willie Minifees, Jessie Rockmore, Lavatrice, McIntyre, the cross-eyed woman, and the rest, have such blood and bone truth in their presentations that the book could be a documentary about life in 1950s. Much as the blues music of the 1950s reflected life of the Black populations, the characters in this novel reflect both the segregated and integrated realities of 1950s America.

What is most magnificent about Three Days Before the Shooting is Ellison’s command and use of words. This novel is rich and deep and thick with words. Open the book to any page and you will become immersed in the movement and play of monologues, observations, recollections, letters, speeches, and sermons. The novel reads like music, a baroque rendition of the blues with layers of sounds, rhythms, and meaning communicating hopes and heartbreak, the painful smack of reality and the endurance of just getting on with it all. People talk “white” or talk “black”, and tell the truth of what they’ve seen as they see the truth to be. These variations together build the story of Hickman, Bliss, and Severen, but most importantly, the words build towards a crescendo of truth about race and identity in America.

The way in which Ellison constructed his novel — how he uses words to both illuminate and obfuscate the truth behind his story of a white child raised by a black man — is a deliberate deployment of what Ellison sees as a legacy of slavery: “the way we talk… you know that our people like to talk around a subject even when there’s no danger. They enjoy it, and if they know you well enough they’re apt to leave their true subject unstated so you’ll have to supply the missing meaning.” Ellison uses the linking narratives of his many characters to circle around and around the novel’s underlying truth. At times the different layers are dizzying. The novel becomes a maze of differing points of view and of tangents gone off on and then returned from; we are returned back to the main story but from a different angle, and we see everything in a new way.

Hickman warns Bliss of the power of words: “Words are everything and don’t you forget it, ever.” Bliss takes the advice but he abandons the positive and life-affirming use of words that Hickman has tried to instill and instead resorts to life-negating rhetoric of hate and prejudice. A son rejects his father with words but the greater rejection is the wordless abandonment of a son by his true father. Ellison uses the words of one of the most powerful phrases, “Lord, why hast thou forsaken me?” to represent both the disbelief and the despair caused by such abandonment. Sunraider calls those words out when the assassin’s bullets strike; Hickman instructs Bliss as a child to recite those words during a dramatization of rebirth through Christ; and Ellison returns us again and again to the lamentation. It is not only the cry of Bliss and of Severen, neither to ever know their fathers. But more, much more, it is the plea of an entire population. The words evoke the abandonment of the Black slaves, set free by Lincoln but then left uncared for and undone. There is a marvelous scene of Black pilgrims visiting the Lincoln Memorial and reflecting on the promise of the man and the failure of a nation.

The breadth and bravery of Ellison’s writing is demonstrated by how he tackles his themes of what it means to be black in America, what it means to be white, and the promise and failure of the American Dream. It is a great pity that Ellison never finished this magnificent novel. Perhaps the novel could not be finished because Three Days Before the Shooting raises the issue of what race has to do with our identity as Americans and resolution of that question — who are we? — is far from being realized. We are still a nation divided by racial identity, more than forty years after Ellison began his novel. One hundred and forty years after the Juneteenth declaration that all Americans, black and white, are equal in the pursuit of and entitlement to happiness, liberty, and respect, we are still struggling with what these words - Black, White, American — mean. Ralph Ellison in Three Days Before the Shooting offers a vision that transcends race, recording both the common ground and the individual experiences that define who we are: Americans.

Reviewed by Nina Sankovitch at www.readallday.org

Published by Modern Library (Random House) - Hardcover - 1136 pages - $50.00

Hold Love Strong by Matthew Aaron Goodman is an extraordinary novel for its voice, its vision, and its promise.  The voice is that of Abraham Singleton, born to a thirteen-year old girl and an absent twenty-year old father; the year is 1982 America and the place is the projects, Ever Park building in Queens, New York.  The vision is Goodman’s Singleton family, a realistic, full, and inspiring portrayal of what it takes to be a family and hold love strong amidst an environment that is relentless in its hopelessness, merciless in its dispensation of pain, and isolated behind walls of ignorance — not the ignorance of the inhabitants but of those on the outside, all those who live beyond the world of Ever Park and have no clue of what really goes on in the inner city, and even worse, do not really seem to care. The promise is that there are boys and girls who can survive places like Ever Park, through luck, through someone watching out for them, and through someone on the outside taking an interest in what goes on inside the neighborhood, and inside the hearts and minds of its inhabitants.

Abraham’s narration is genuine and clear; he is a boy we watch turn into a man and the process is painful, frustrating, awkward, and beautiful.  Abraham’s voice is one of conflicting emotions, uncertain status, threatened identity, and in turns hopeful and hopeless.  Paragraphs of questions underscore the uncertainty of Abraham’s life — “Who was she?  Who was this woman who so loved me while I slept yet was so uninterested in me when I was awake?  And which Abraham was I, the one my mother saw or the one my grandma knew; the one who needed to be scolded and coddled or the one who was deemed a man, albeit prematurely and without warrant?”; the questions that just keep coming, more and more questioning as Abraham grows from childhood into adulthood, questions that demonstrate the level of insecurity in terms of present needs (like food and medical care) and of future prospects (employment, health, family): “what chance do I have?”  Abraham wants to be a man but a man unlike the men he sees around him causing so much pain:”I had witnessed the damage other men caused and I didn’t want any part of being like the others, not their presence or absence.”

The most harrowing question posed, again and again, by Abraham and by the people of his community, is “What are the living supposed to do?….Should I cry out?…Should I demand to know why?  Do I plea for justice and peace?…I don’t know.” How to go on, when there is no future that can promise peace, sufficiency, stability?  Survival is through family (bonds of love), church (bonds of faith), or sadly, through escape via drugs that while destroying life, provide a buffer from pain and hopelessness that have become intolerable, or via mental illness, as seen in the character of Lindbergh, veteran of the Vietnam war and creator of magical helicopters to fly up and out of Ever Park.

Goodman creates a moving and unique relationship between Abraham and Donnell, the cousin who, although just five years older than Abraham, becomes his care giver, his protector, his touchstone, and his most faithful, believing, and exacting friend.  It is Donnell who must grow too soon into a man, and who skirts the line between what is legal and what is required for his family to survive; in the end, Donnell will be the one who blows his anger and frustration out in a game of basketball that is really a proclamation of worth, a manifestation of will, and a desperate bid for respect: “You leave it here.  Everything.  All the blood, sweat, tears.  Ain’t nothing that can stop you.”  When Abraham has to take stock of what his life has been and what he wants it to become, he recognizes the debt he owes to Donnell and the strength of the love he bears for him: it is a love that sustains Abraham as much as it sustains Donnell.

That is the strength of the hold of family love: it gives back as much as is given out. Love is the only lasting definite in the lives of the Singleton family, their existence  rife with transience (anyone could be shot dead at any time or hauled off to jail or just disappear into drugs) and uncertainty (lives, wasted and wasting, surround them).  But alongside the harrowing realities of daily life, love is the constant, whether it is the love of Donnell, protective and demanding; the love of Nice, so powerful that he cuts off all contact with his family when his own pain is too much for them to bear; the love of the grandmother, who does whatever it takes to keep the apartment and its inhabitants safe; the love of Aunt Rhonda, with her affectionate and obstinate pride in her family; or the love of Abraham’s mother, demonstrated through the care she takes of Abraham though she is still a child herself.  Love is a circle enveloping the Singleton family, even through its darkest hours of sorrow, hate, pain, and hopelessness.

Hold Love Strong is a powerful novel about one boy’s epic journey of survival against all odds.  That communities of insidious hopelessness, nonexistent opportunities, and failed political and civic promises exist is well-known and Hold Love Strong makes its truth a condemnation: communities of plenty are failing communities of need.  But Hold Love Strong is much more than a social commentary on failures of our society: it is a testament to the will to survive and to surpass. The book is fiction but every word of it rings true: in following its cycles of misery and possibility, of abandonment and connection, of loneliness and of brotherhood, we are all made witness to the enduring possibility — and our shared responsibility to foster that possibility — that any child can find wings and fly.

Reviewed by Nina Sankovitch, www.readallday.org

Published by Simon and Schuster - hardcover - 368 pages - $24.95

Ralph Truitt has lead a hard life with a father who is more interested in raising an heir to his fortune than a son and a mother is a religious zealot who makes it clear that she does not love him. Nothing since then has served to make him a happier person. So, as this story begins, he is waiting for the arrive of a woman who has answered his ad for a reliable wife. He has long since given up on finding love in his life, but he needs a wife to help him bring his estranged son home. Catherine Land, who is responding to his ad, is a devious woman, motivated by greed and with a dark past. She is coming to Wisconsin to marry Ralph, slowly poison him and leave Wisconsin a wealthy widow. But Ralph is a more compassionate man than Catherine was expecting and Catherine begins to bring out feelings in Ralph that he had thought he was incapable of having any longer.

The story is unique, Goolrick’s writing terse but descriptive. As Ralph is waiting for Catherine’s train, I could feel the cold wind stinging his cheeks. It’s easy to envision the people of Truitt, WI, Catherine’s clothing, Truitt’s homes.
After reading several books recently that I didn’t enjoy, in part because I didn’t like any of the characters, Goolrick reminded me here that liking the characters is not a requisite for liking the book. Goolrick gives his characters fully fleshed out backgrounds that help the reader to understand their actions even as you are appalled by them. Because of this, the reader is able to hold onto a hope for the characters to become better people, to make better lives for themselves.

Despite the bitter winter setting, this is a story of lust and passions. As such, there is a great deal of description of the fulfillment of these passions that some readers may find uncomfortable to read. I wasn’t uncomfortable with it, but I did feel like there was too much of it. Likewise, Goolrick could become repetitive and often ran on too long in his descriptions of motives, feelings and thoughts. All of that I was able to overlook because thought the story was wonderful. There were twists and turns I didn’t see coming and I had no idea how this book was going to end until the final paragraph. I read this book as part of a book club and, honestly, was not sure that I would like it. Having lower expectations made my enjoyment of the book a very pleasant surprise.

Reviewed by Lisa Sheppard - http://litandlife.blogspot.com/

Published by Algonquin Books - Hardcover - 978-1565125964 - $23.95

Ruins by Achy Obejas is a beautifully written novel, an incredibly humanistic portrayal of one man’s life in Cuba. Born before the Cuban revolution, and named after the U.S. Navy ships his mother can see from shore close to Guantanamo (a U.S. base already there since 1898), Usnavy is destined to live a life under shadow of the United States, both its lure and its warning.  He never waivers from being a true believer in Cuba, and in all that Che Guevara promised the revolution would bring for the downtrodden of Cuba, but present times are testing his faith.  Set in 1994, Usnavy reveals details of his life before the revolution, a life of degradation and hopelessness.  His consequent embracing of the Revolution makes perfect sense:  “It was because of the Revolution..that he could participate as a responsible member of society, as good as anyone else.  It was because of the Revolution, he believed, that he wasn’t dismissed as some hick from the hills.  It was because of the Revolution that the lifeline on his hand had been rerouted, that he was born every day a New Man.”

But Usnavy’s life is very hard. He works every day at a bodega, fulfilling the ration cards of the people who line up for goods: “soap was scarce, coffee rare; no one could remember the last time there was meat.  Sometimes all he had was rice, or worse, those detestable peas used to supplement beans, or when ground up, used as a coffee substitute.”  He lives in one room with his beloved wife and daughter, a room without windows and with a floor always wet with leaks. The communal bathroom of the tenement is found by the swarm of flies that envelop it, and with every rainfall the danger of the entire building collapsing threatens. Every day more and more Cubans take to the sea, escaping to America.  When good friends leave, Usnavy becomes fearful that his own daughter will be next, drawn by the good fortunes of those who made it the ninety miles across the sea, and repelled by her father’s own “salao”, bad luck.

Usnavy owns a magnificent lamp, huge and glowing with varied colors of light from its many panels of decorative glass. Left to him as the only legacy from his mother, the lamp reminds Usnavy of all that is beautiful and possible in his world, and it connects him to the past, his mother and his Jamaican father (long ago disappeared at sea).  But one day Usnavy makes a discovery that connects him and his lamp to the history of Cuba itself.  Keeping the lamp and himself whole becomes a parable for the future of Cuba as Che dreamed of it: will the need for dollars overwhelm Usnavy or will the lifeblood of the lamp sustain him in his faith?

There are both incredible and quiet details in Ruins about daily life in Cuba: his daughter’s dinner of a meat sandwich but it is only wool marinated in spices, “the texture of the wool had been transformed into what they all imagined steak was like, something tender and chewy”; Usnavy’s three pairs of underwear, one to wear, one to wash while bathing, and one to keep ironed and folded in his small drawer; Usnavy’s nightly domino games with his friends in the plaza; the constant shadow of the U.S., both in Cuban history (Hemingway and the U.S. love affair with everything Cuban), in products (the best appliances are U.S. made), and in politics (the embargo, of course, as well as the 1994 invasion of Haiti by the U.S.); young girls in lycra plying the streets at night for tourist dollars; outdoor dances and government parades; Socialist Committee-sponsored abuse of those Cubans waiting in line for visas to America; the constant gnaw of hunger; and Usnavy’s long bike rides  through the streets of Havana.

These details, woven around a compelling and surprising plot, make for a beautiful book. But this is much more than a great historical mystery set in Cuba or the compelling story of one man’s spiritual conflict: this is a book that exposes the sufferings of the Cuban people, both before and after the Revolution.  No matter what your politics, the book underscores both the brutality of life before Che and Castro (no romanticizing of the period when the Upper Classes lived like royalty and the lower classes were kept down like animals), and the sufferings and deprivations of life under Castro.  Only misery and complete loss of hope could drive people numbering in the thousands to take to the sea in less than seaworthy crafts, braving ninety miles of  sharks and storms, just to get away from Cuba.

Usnavy will never leave: he is in love with his country, bound up with its history, proud of its revolutionaries, and still holding hope for its future.  Despite all that he suffers, we understand his attachment, it all makes sense as part and parcel of the man Obejas has created for us.  Usnavy is a good man, he shares what little he has: “that was his way; whatever was available was for everyone equally.  That was what he knew and understood.”  He is a quiet man with pleasure found in the riding of his bike, the playing of dominoes, watching the sea at night, and hearing the breathing of his wife and daughter while they sleep. He is the last man we would ever want to see hardened or bitter: his faith is too true, his needs so minimal, his efforts so sincere.  He desires only to “die old and contented…in the soft dapple of a primal Antillean night.”

This novel is an incredible affirmation of life and of the power of the survival instinct.  We want Usnavy to find refuge from suffering and loss, and we fervently hope that he never sees himself betrayed by his Revolution but that he lives contented in a dream of it; that the huge lamp survives, its history and its power intact.

Reviewed by Nina Sankovitch on readallday.org

Published by Akashic Books - paperback - 978-1933354699 - $15.95

I devoured Alice Fantastic by Maggie Estep. I sat down and read it and did not get  up for anything. This book is great. Estep’s charming and down-dirty story about lucky and plucky Alice, her clumsy sister Eloise, and their dog-rescuing, ex-junkie mother, presents the hilarious and sometimes heartbreaking ways people intertwine, overlap and just plain run over each other in the acts of love, friendship, sex, and gambling — and all other acts of resistance.

This book is wonderful because of its fabulous characters and delicious plot, all sprung from Estep’s original and uninhibited mind.  The people of this novel are maybe not wholly believable but I took them as mythical members of the wild and crazy New York universe and went willingly along on the spin-of-the-wheel ride of their lives.  Free will — and these women are wilful — meets those little flips of fate that round out into destiny, or sometimes just a one-night stand. The struggle facing our characters is the age-old mandate to connect (”just connect”) and the obstacles they face are the tried and true Guilt, Pleasure, and Duty.

The characters didn’t need the catalyst of the mother’s big secret to get moving.  They are never static and their movement brings change: forward marching, then retracting, then forward again, they  lurch on, rapacious and certain, then stop, regroup, become subdued and questioning.  All three of them face their own crisis of the heart and confrontation of the soul.  We admire them (I loved them) for being forced to look into the mirror and reacting so very honestly to what they see.

Estep is adept with words.  Her sisters and their mother are each narrator of different chapters and they all speak with distinct cadences and linguistic choices: we know them as well as by their rhythms and words as by their actions. Estep’s physical descriptions are right on and perfect: “The sky over Aqueduct was the color of dead television.”  She is often hilarious: “Her eyes were bright and her big curly hair had, I swear, gotten bigger and curlier.  She was verging on looking like Malcolm Gladwell.”  Estep can write great one liners, real Oscar Wilde zingers, like my favorite: “She has led an unconventional life and it has agreed with her.”  I wouldn’t mind that as my epitaph.

Read this great book about sisters and mothers and friends and lovers, and sex, dogs, food, and gambling.  It will leave you reaching out and grabbing hold of someone or some dog or some idea.  You’ll bake yourself a cake with white icing, you’ll commit to skinny dipping at least once a summer, and you’ll never, ever bet on a race unless you’ve done the homework.  Alice Fantastic will inspire you to take the gamble of your life and run with it.

Reviewed by Nina Sankovitch on readallday.org

Published by Akashic Books - paperback  -978-1933354811 - $15.95

The Beauty of the Hedgehog

The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery is a great book.  This beautiful, moving, and occasionally very funny novel tells the story of an amazing woman and a startling young girl, and their parallel and eventually joined paths to recognition of beauty, in the self and in the world.

Renee is the concierge of a very upscale building in Paris, a supremely intelligent and grammatically exacting woman, and Paloma is one of her tenants , a 12-year old girl already fed up with the falseness of the adults around her and doubtful about life’s possibilities. Renee is acutely aware and appreciative of life’s moments of beauty and yet is unable to grasp the absolute beauty within herself.  Paloma is a French, intelligent, and female prepubescent version of Holden Caulfield, a confused and disillusioned but still young and therefore reachable rebel.  Her thoughts are presented to us through her two thoroughly engaging and at times heartbreaking journals; from Renee we get her inner thoughts and observations through first person narration.

This book is about finding a reason to live but it is absolutely un-American in its prescription: there is no easy path, life is full of difficulties, and you are on your own.  But if you are honest and intelligent and exacting, you will find and appreciate the beauty that exists in relationships and music and nature and books.  The book is about the pure beauty that is possible in moments of genuine expression, the fleeting moments that can still last forever in our minds because of their beauty and truth.

If we are lucky, many such moments occur in our lives and we are mindful enough to grasp the beauty.  One rainy afternoon I spent in a Barcelona Art Museum over twenty-five years ago, I was stopped short by a painting. I will always remember the beauty of that painting (although I can remember neither author nor title), and the painting has its same power to bring peace to me now as it did then.  It is a simple landscape of a dawning sky over a dark hillside, with a hermit just coming out of his cave in the hill.  Apricot-orange lines had been painted in beyond the darkened hermit and his burrow to show the dawning of day;  looking at the painting I felt the thawing wind of spring, the precious beat of living, the gratitude for another day granted.  Memories of mornings I’d spent in the country entwined with the experience of seeing the painting, creating layers of time to be stored and later savored.  The moment of seeing that painting and the moments of experiencing what was presented in that painting are moments that, when brought back by remembering, have sustained and comforted me.

Renee is also aware of the threaded memories of life, and of the beauty that endures to sustain and inspire us to continue on with the sometimes heavy burden of living; she tries to pass that knowledge to Paloma, not through lessons or lectures, but through sharing of ideas and thoughts.  It is the joy of conversation, of realizing a shared observation or enthusiasm or dis-enthusiasm, that brings Paloma around to a new commitment to living, even when faced very suddenly with death.

The Elegance of the Hedgehog offers us Renee’s beautiful but thoroughly realistic appraisal of life. When she herself must re-examine what she thought she knew about herself, the forced examination does not undercut her appraisal but serves to support it even more: we understand, as she does, that by living fully observant and appreciative of the beauty that appears fleetingly in actual time but permanently in our minds, we can survive and surpass the mundane and trivial and superficial.  We can make connections and stave off alienation; each moment caught by our flourishing minds only makes all the moments to come better and better. Young Paloma commits herself to finding those “moments of always within never” as a reason to live and that reason is good enough for me.

Reviewed by Nina Sankovitch - On the Read all Day blog, Nina blogs about one book a day.

Published by Europa Books - paperback - 978-1933372600 - $15.00

Six novels in one.

The word genius is bandied about in several of the reviews I read of David Mitchell’s fourth novel, Cloud Atlas, and so I decided to read it, thinking Shakespeare, Beethoven, Einstein, Michaelangelo, etc., people who in my opinion, fill this billing. I found no genius in Cloud Atlas, but what I did find was a courageous attempt, including many brilliant moments, to write an apocalyptic novel for our times.

Let me start, and dismiss, the structure: six separate narratives linked by a comet-shaped birth mark, a music manuscript and probably a couple of other props that I missed. These are not in any event significant (if they are I missed the point) and the narratives are not really related except in the overarching sense that mankind has done and will continue to do bad things, including destroy the planet, all because of the will to wealth and power by the bad people among us. An old theme but one that bears scrutiny and, as I say, takes courage to address.

The heart of the book is the novella entitled, Sloosha’s Crossin’ An’ Ev’rythin’ After. This is a brilliant evocation of the world after the fall, a subject that has always fascinated me (think Alas, Babylon, A Canticle For Liebowitz, On The Beach), and one that Mitchell utterly dominates. His creation of language, culture, artifact, religion and poignant myth-like memories of the world before the fall, along with a compelling story line about a simple man caught up in the battle against evil, is brilliant and the work of a wildly creative yet disciplined imagination.

Two of the other stories come close to Sloosha’s, but do not quite hit the mark. The first part of The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing, which is where Cloud Atlas begins, is the story of a good and honest man traveling as a passenger on a schooner from Australia to San Francisco. The horrors of these journeys under tyrannical and evil captains have been described before, but Mitchell’s take, with his balance between Ewing’s interior and exterior lives is well worth the read.

As is An Orison of Sonmi-451, a novella set in futuristic Korea, in which a cloned “fabricant” escapes  her slave status and ends up as the goddess worshipped by the simple inhabitants of Sloosha’s world. This narrative is filled with clichés (the planet is being destroyed by corporate greed, clones are deceived into believing they will go to an island paradise when they have completed their service, etc.). It is, however, saved from the cliché dust bin by the wonderfully imaginative setting Mitchell creates: language, technology, myriad Big Brother accessories—all come across as completely believable. This story, done in a series of interviews with the future goddess, lacks the fear factor that made 1984 great, but it is quite an achievement.

The other novellas, one pointless, (or to me, anyway) about a publisher trapped inn a nursing home, and the other–about a reporter in 1975 California trying to expose, a la Jane Fonda in The China Syndrome–the fatal design flaw in an atomic energy plant–is too painfully politically correct to be interesting. God appears out of a machine to save the heroine so often in this story that I thought at first Mitchell was pulling the leg of his readers, but no, he meant it.

I did not find genius in Cloud Atlas. I should not have expected to, knowing that the meaning of the word has been dumbed down, along with almost everything else in our culture. But it does contain brilliance and some great story-telling. For these reasons it is well worth reading.

Reviewed by James LePore , author of A World I Never Made.

Published by Random House - paperback - 978-0375507250 - $14.95

Breathing in Art

Reading Willa Cather’s The Song of the Lark is like breathing in art, instead of air.  It’s in the words chosen by the author, in Thea’s artistic pursuit of her voice (a lark, of course, known for its beautiful songs), and in Thea’s love of the painting, ”The Song of the Lark,” by French painter Jules Breton.  Here on the cover, it was painted in 1884, and now hangs in the Art Institute of Chicago, perhaps since 1894.  The book was published in 1915.

Thea describes the painting:

“But in that same room there was a picture–oh, that was the thing she ran upstairs so fast to see!  That was her picture…She liked even the name of it, “The Song of the Lark.”  The flat country, the early morning light, the wet fields, the look in the girl’s heavy face–well, they were all hers, anyhow, whatever was there.  She told herself that that picture was ‘right.’  Just what she meant by this, it would take a clever person to explain.  But to her the word covered the almost boundless satisfaction she felt when she looked at the picture.”

Toward the end of the novel, Thea says:  “I had lived a long, eventful life, and an artist’s life, every hour of it.  Wagner says, in his most beautiful opera, that art is only a way of remembering youth.  And the older we grow the more precious it seems to us, and the more richly we can present that memory.”

When the novel opens, Thea is eleven.  We meet her first as a child.  Late in the book, she says, “A child’s attitude toward everything is an artist’s attitude.”  Henri Matisse, years later, emphasizes this point in his famous essay, “Looking at Life with the Eyes of a Child.”  The artist, he writes, must look at everything “as though he were seeing it for the first time:  he has to look at life as he did when he was a child.”

Thea says, “They save me: the old things, things like the Kohlers’ garden.  They are in everything I do.”  It’s her being able to reach them, inside herself , that allows her to come into the fullness of her voice.

Reviewed by Cynthia Newberry Martin at Catching Days which is one of Powell’s Books’ “Lit Blogs We Love.”

Publisher by Wilder Publications - paperback - 978-1604595109 - $12.95

Full Circle

In July, I read Arlington Park by Rachel Cusk, a writer I’d never read before.  Upon finishing the novel, I immediately wanted to reread it.  Instead, I began a journey that has lasted four months:  reading each of Rachel Cusk’s books in the order she wrote them.  With this post, we come full circle, back to the book that started it all.

Watching Rachel Cusk develop as a writer was like watching a house being built.  With Arlington Park, her most recent book published in 2006, not only is the house built and decorated, but the author is now sitting by the fire with a latte.

Arlington Park is well written and digs deep into truth.  It’s about women–real and flawed.  It’s about marriage.  It’s about not only the lives we plan to live and choose to live, but the lives we end up living.  In an article written in 2005, Cusk said, “I remain fascinated by where you go as a woman once you are a mother, and if you ever come back.”  Arlington Park is one of the best books I read in 2008, and a new addition to my all-time favorite books.

The first sentence:  “All night the rain fell on Arlington Park.”  The falling of rain appears like a refrain throughout the book.  The rain falls on everyone in Arlington Park.  It falls on all of us.

The novel is divided into ten unmarked sections:  1-the rain fell; 2-Juliet; 3-Amanda; 4-Christine, Maisie and Stephanie at the mall; 5-Solly; 6-in the park/the rain had stopped; 7-Juliet; 8-Maisie; 9-Christine; and 10-party at Christine’s with Juliet, Maisie, and Maggie.

The first time I read it, I was so taken with Juliet that I didn’t want to leave her to switch to Amanda.  This time, it did not feel like a brusque change, but felt right.  Because it’s not just about one of us; it’s about all of us.

Here’s a little flavor of what you have to look forward to:

Juliet about a recording of a song by Ravel:  “The sound of it brought tears to Juliet’s eyes. It was the voice, that woman’s voice, so solitary and powerful, so–transcendent. It made Juliet think she could transcend it all, this little house with its stained carpets, its shopping, its flawed people, transcend the grey, rain-sodden distances of Arlington Park; transcend, even her own body, where bitterness lay like lead in the veins. She could open somewhere like a flower…open out all the petals packed inside her.”

Solly about her inability to communicate with a Japanese student renting out their extra room:  “…she became aware of how much of her lay shrouded in this inarticulable darkness.”

Solly:  “Suddenly she saw her life as a breeding ground, a community under a rock…There was a lack of light, a lack of higher purpose to it all. How could she have forgotten to find out what else there was? How could she have stayed there, under her rock, down in the mulch, and forgotten to take a look outside and see what was going on? All at once she didn’t know what she’d been thinking of.”

Reviewed by Cynthia Newberry Martin at Catching Days a wonderful blog that is one of Powell’s Books’ “Lit Blogs We Love.”

Published by Picador - paperback - 978-0312426729 - $14.00

A brief synopsis:
A lost child…
On the eve of the first world war, a little girl is found abandoned on a ship to Australia. A mysterious woman called the Authoress had promised to look after her – but the Authoress has disappeared without a trace.
A terrible secret…
On the night of her twenty-first birthday, Nell O’Connor learns a secret that will change her life forever. Decades later, she embarks upon a search for the truth that leads her to the windswept Cornish coast and the strange and beautiful Blackhurst Manor, once owned by the aristocratic Mountrachet family.
A mysterious inheritance…
On Nell’s death, her grand-daughter, Cassandra, comes into an unexpected inheritance. Cliff Cottage and its forgotten garden are notorious amongst the Cornish locals for the secrets they hold – secrets about the doomed Mountrachet family and their ward Eliza Makepeace, a writer of dark Victorian fairytales. It is here that Cassandra will finally uncover the truth about the family, and solve the century-old mystery of a little girl lost.

It’s really difficult to tell you much about this book without spoilers. So while I was thinking about how to write the review I read the synopsis on Kate Morton’s site (given above). As you can see there are 3 layers to this novel. 3 layers that answer the same questions, ’Where did Nell come from?’, ‘Who were here parents?’ and ‘why was she put on a ship to Australia as a 4 year old?’

‘The forgotten garden’ is a journey to find these answers, a mystery that spans 2 continents and 2 centuries, a mystery that will lead 2 women, Nell and Cassandra, to Cornish coast, Blackhurst Manor and ultimately to a cottage on a cliff and a forgotten garden. A garden that lives and breathes, a garden where fairy tales were written and secrets kept safe.

When Nell was 4 she was left alone on a ship sailing from Europe to Australia. She was adopted by a man who found her all alone and couldn’t leave her to fend for herself. When Nell turns 21, her father tells her the truth. Nell is devastated by this. After some years, before her father dies, he arranges to return to Nell the suitcase with which she had arrived. Based on its contents and a book of Fairy Tales written by Eliza Makepiece, Nell decides to find out who she really is. After Nell dies, her granddaughter Cassandra follows her grandmother’s footsteps when she learns that Nell has left her a cottage in Europe as an inheritance.

Essentially there are 3 stories running in parallel, Nell’s search for her parents, Cassandra’s search for her grandmother’s past and finally the story of Eliza and Rose, where it all began.

This was my first Kate Morton book and I was blown away by her writing and her ability to spin 3 complicated plots together. Al though at times I was confused with what was happening; overall it was a fantastic book. I wanted more of this book and considering it’s almost 600 pages, that’s saying a lot. Her writing is so beautiful that I found myself getting lost in the small sea side town, in Eliza and Rose’s story and wondering how it all fit. I tried to guess the mystery a lot of times but was always wrong. The story I loved reading most of all was that of Eliza. She was so vivacious, rebellious and full of life.

Kate Morton’s writing is so evocative and her way of describing things is so beautiful that you cannot help but get lost in the story. Take for example,

He was a scribble of a man. Frail and fine and stooped from a knot in the center of his knobbled back. Beige slacks with grease spots clung to the marbles of his knees, twiglike ankles rose stoically from over-sized shoes, and tufts of white floss sprouted from various fertile spots on a otherwise smooth scalp. He looked like a character from a children’s story. A fairy story.

Some people might find the writing style very wordy but it worked for me. I suggest giving this book your full attention instead of clubbing it with a couple of other reads, because as I said, there are 3 plots running simultaneously and if you read it in gaps you might get confused by the jumps.

Highly Recommended.

P.S: If you like reading fairy tales, you might like this book even more.

Reviewed by VioletCrush - here’s the link to her excellent blog

Published by Atria - hardcover - 978-1416550549 - $26.00.